Something You Should Know - US: Getting Past the You and Me Relationship & How Fragrance Works - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: June 29, 2024

Getting car sick can really ruin a trip – for EVERYONE in the car! But maybe you’ve heard – there are now motion sickness glasses. Do they work? Reader’s Digest tested them and a lot of their readers left reviews. Listen and you will hear what they said. https://www.rd.com/article/motion-sickness-glasses/ How can you be in a relationship and still be your individual self? That can be a tricky balance. And it has gotten even trickier as we have moved into our “It’s-all-about-me” culture. Joining me to offer some insight into this is internationally recognized family therapist, speaker, and author Terrence Real. author of the book US: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (https://amzn.to/3bLzN6N). Terry’s website is https://www.terryreal.com Who doesn’t want to smell nice? Soaps, candles, laundry detergent, perfume – we really want everything and everyone to smell ever so lovely. But why? When did this all start? Listen to my guest Elise Pearlstine, a natural perfumer, consultant, and educator and author of a book called Scent: A Natural History of Fragrance. (https://amzn.to/3AtMA8b). If you have ever wondered why flowers or the smell of cut grass or vanilla smell so good, listen to find out. One of the worst things about summer is getting into a hot car that has been sitting in the sun. However, there is a way you can cool the car down before you get in it. Listen and I will tell you this fast and effective technique. https://www.wikihow.com/Cool-a-Hot-Car-as-Quickly-as-Possible PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Go to https://Shopify.com/sysk now to grow your business - no matter what stage you're in! eBay Motors has 122 million parts for your #1 ride-or-die, to make sure it stays running smoothly. Keep your ride alive at https://eBayMotors.com We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know. Do motion sickness glasses really work? If you get queasy on car rides, you'll want to hear this. Then, is it really possible to be in a long-term relationship and always be happy? I just did a piece for the New York Times on what I call normal marital hatred. It's okay to cross from harmony through disharmony into repair, but you have to know how. Plus, the best way to cool down a car that's been sitting in the hot summer sun.

And what you may not know about the fascinating history of fragrances and perfumes. Different perfumes smell different on different people. Some people can wear florals and they smell great and on some people they turn kind of sour. When you do wear, especially a very good perfume, it blends with your skin and it becomes a little bit more you. All this today on Something You Should Know. This episode is brought to you by Melissa & Doug.

Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving, and arts and crafts for creative thinking, Melissa & Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world. Because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow melissa and doug the play is pretend the skills are real look for melissa and doug wherever you shop for toys something you should know fascinating intel the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know.

You know, nothing puts a damper on a car trip than when somebody says, I don't feel good. I'm going to throw up. I don't feel good at all. If anyone in your family is prone to car sickness, you've probably heard all the home remedies that are supposed to ease the symptoms. And there's a new one you should probably be aware of. They have these eyeglasses that supposedly prevent motion sickness. Now, I've never tried them because I typically don't get car sick, but recently Reader's Digest tested them out

and if you haven't seen them, they look a little weird. They're kind of these big googly-eyed glasses that contain two holes to look through in the front. And then there's also two holes to the side of each eye. The holes at the side protect the wearer's peripheral vision from becoming sensitive to motion, which is often what brings on that dizzy, sick feeling. But the glasses don't contain lenses. Instead, they use a leveling liquid to synchronize eyes as they move. Do they work? Well, the Reader's Digest tester said they did, and they have a lot of five-star ratings and reviews on Amazon. And since they only cost about $24, it might be worth giving them a try.

By the way, they're not an advertiser. We're not being paid to say this. It's just that I know how car sickness can ruin a trip, so I figured that's something you should know. Here's a term you may not have heard before, toxic individualism. It refers to the idea that people in our culture have become more focused on themselves, as in, it's all about me. And this has created a big problem for relationships, because how can you be in a relationship which is all about us, when your focus is all about you?

This is according to Terrence Real. He's an internationally recognized family therapist, speaker, and author who's written some incredibly successful books on relationships, including I Don't Want to Talk About It and The New Rules of Marriage. His latest book is called Us, Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, which has already become a big bestseller in just a few weeks. Hi Terrence, welcome. Well, thank you. It's a joy to be here. So explain your view of relationships as it relates to that term that you have coined, toxic individualism. Michael, our relationships are our biospheres. We're not

outside of them, we're in them. And once we realize ecological humility, once we realize that you're in your marriage, you're not above it, then everything changes. You can choose to pollute your biosphere by having a temper tantrum over here, but you're going to breathe in that pollution in your partner's withdrawal or lack of generosity. Okay, but I think the concern is that even in a relationship, we are individuals. We are people, and we don't want to lose ourselves for the sake of the relationship. I'm not saying that there isn't such a thing as an individual. And yes, you are an individual with your own wants and needs.

Good. I want you to assert that. But I want you to assert it in the wisdom of a larger context. We are a team. What are we going to do? You know, it's the difference between saying, Michael, don't talk to me like that, which is fair enough, and saying, hey, look, I want to hear what you have to say. Could you tone it down so I could really listen? It's remembering that you and I are a team and it is in my interest, my enlightened self-interest, for both of us to be

able to work together to make this work for both of us. That seems very logical and normal and right and yet people struggle with it because in the heat of the moment it is often very hard to take that very measured approach of why can't we just talk about this like grown-ups? That's exactly right. And when I'm working with a couple, the biggest question is, who am I talking to? Which part of you am I talking to? You're dead on. Am I talking to the grown-up part of you? We call it the prefrontal cortex part of the brain, I call it the wise adult, or am I talking to some triggered part of you that has everything to do with your trauma and how you adapted to that trauma, fight, flight, or fix. It's knee-jerk, automatic,

and that's the reactive part of us that gets us into so much trouble. And the essence of my work is what I call relational mindfulness. Precisely in that heated moment, how to cultivate the skill, build the muscle of taking a break. I'm a big fan of breaks. Counting to ten, splashing some water, doing whatever you need to do to remember love. Remember that the person you're speaking to is not the enemy and that the reason why you're speaking is to make things better. If you're not in that place, if you're in that reactive place, take a walk around the block, take a break, have a little chat with your little boy or girl inside,

but get centered and then go back into the fray. That's the only way that things are going to get better. One of the things I've always thought wears relationships down is that when there is a problem, when there is conflict, it's often the same old thing. You've fought about this before. You've had a conflict over this before. It's not like we're coming up with new and exciting things to fight about. It's the same thing. And it just gets wearing.

Can I tell you a story? Of course. So I deal with couples on the brink of divorce. That's my specialty. And this with couples on the brink of divorce that's my specialty and this couple was on the brink of divorce the guy was a chronic liar he lied about everything so that is his repeated adaptive child stance over and over again he lies all right so I'm a relational therapist. I think relationally. I ask him something that when you're thinking

as individuals, you would think, oh, how did he get that? I say to him, who tried to control you growing up? See, the guy had a black belt in evasion. Where did he learn that? What was he adopting to? Who did he evade? Sure enough enough my father tell me about it military man utterly controlling how he ate how he sat

everything I say to him how did you cope with this guy and he looks at me and smiles I like that smile and he says to me I I lied. Smart little boy. I teach my students, always be respectful of the exquisite intelligence of the adaptive child. You did back then just what you needed to do to survive and be whole. But adaptive then, maladaptive now. He's not that little boy. His wife is not his father. So we surface all this. It's a true story. They come back two weeks later, hand in hand, all smiles were cured. Okay, there's a tale here. Tell me. He goes to the grocery store

with a list of 12 things from his wife. And true to form, he comes back with 11. The wife says to him, where's the pumpernickel? He says, every muscle and nerve in my body was screaming to say they were out of it. But in this moment, on this day, I thought of you, I gathered my courage, I looked my wife in the eye eye and I said, I forgot. And she burst into tears and said, I've been waiting for this moment for 25 years. That's moving out of that automatic adaptive child response we learned as kids and reaching for something new, different, more mature, and more skilled. And we can learn to do that. So what's one simple thing people can do to get with the program here?

Make a contract to take breaks. I'm a big fan of physical breaks. If you can't control yourself while you're standing there, okay. I'm going to take 20 minutes. I'll be back. Always say when you're coming back. don't leave it open-ended. And then go for a walk around the block, splash some water on your face, talk to that little boy who feels so controlled. Do some breathing, do some meditation. There are millions of exercises now to help you get re-centered.

But get back in the place where it's not you versus me in a zero-sum, win-lose power struggle. I remember love. I remember that you are someone I care about, and it's in my interest to work with you as a teammate to make this work for both of us. Once you're centered there, there's a host of skills you can use, but you won't use any of them until you're out of your reactive brain and into your wise adult. That's the skill to cultivate. Take the break and don't come back until you're in your right mind. So theoretically, if a couple is together, there was something at least in the beginning that brought them together and made them commit to each other. So, and obviously everybody's different,

but what tends to go wrong? Well, I have a saying. We all marry our unfinished business. We all marry our mothers and fathers. We all become our mothers and fathers. And we think when we fall in love, this person is going to complete me. This person is going to heal me. I'm going to get what I never got. And of course, real long-term relationships come when you realize this person is going to re-injure me in exactly the ways I was injured as a kid. That doesn't mean you're in a bad relationship. That's intimacy. I just did a piece for the New York Times on what I call normal marital hatred. It's okay to cross from harmony through disharmony into repair, but you have to know how. You know, there are millions of people who would not throw you into the old drama, but someone who, unless we're very unlucky, someone who has other skills and resources so that if we do something different, they can do something different, and that changes the dance, and that's what heals us. Not that we get it out of them, but that when we do something different,

they'll come along with us. That's what healing our trauma looks like. We're talking about relationships with therapist Terence Real. The name of his book is Us, Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. Metrolinx and Crosslinx are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert,

be aware, and stay safe. Mama, look at me. Vroom, vroom. I'm going really fast. I just got my license. Can I borrow the car, please, Mom? Kids go from 0 to 18 in no time. You'll be relieved they have 24-7 roadside assistance with Intact Insurance. Mom, can we go to Nana's house tomorrow?

Go to Jack's place today. I'll just take the car. Don't wait up, okay? Kids go from 0 to 18 in no time, don't they? At Intact Insurance, we insure your car so you can enjoy the ride. Visit intact.ca or talk to your broker. Conditions apply. So, Terry, it seems that the experience of relationships is often that things go bad very slowly. Like you hardly notice it day to day, and then one day it's broken. Yeah, you're right. I talk about what I call fierce intimacy, that you have to be fierce with each other. You havement builds, sexuality and generosity dies,

and they look like everybody else. I have empathy for people who stop challenging each other in these passionate ways, because when we do, most of us just don't have enough skill to be successful at it. The person we're speaking to gets defensive or we're pretty hostile when we finally talk to them. You have to know how to do it. For example, how to stand up for yourself and be loving and cherishing of your partner in the same breath. Nobody knows how to do that. How do you do that hey Michael when you called me an old fat chauvinist pig a minute ago that pushed me to the other side of the

wall and I'd like to be close to you can you say you're sorry and do something repetitive so I can feel close to you again there are ways to be powerful and loving in the same breath but our culture doesn't teach us. You talk about, you've mentioned a couple of times the idea of repair. And repair implies that something is broken. And in a relationship, sometimes when it's broken, things get said, and they're hard to let go. I mean, even when you apologize, you still said it. You can't unhear it. And sometimes it stings. It's hard to repair. Well, it is hard. Of course it's hard.

But, you know, there's also repair. If your partner says, oh, God, that was terrible of me. I really blew it. And I do love you. And I don't think of you as a chauvinist pig. And I'm really sorry. I hope you accept my apology. My advice would be take a deep breath and accept the apology and make some tea and get on with your life. The problem with holding resentment is that it's bad for you. Someone said resentment is drinking poison and waiting for the other guy to die. Let repair happen. All relationships are an endless dance of harmony, disharmony, and repair.

Closeness, disruption, and a return to closeness. And all of the skills come in when you move from disharmony to repair. The problem is when you move into that disharmony phase, you often get triggered and reactive and you have to take a breath and keep your head in the game in order to use the skills of repair. What about when one person in a relationship just feels like, you know, enough's enough? There's nothing more here for me. I can't go on. I would invite everybody onto my website if I could, terryreel.com, just my name. I have a piece called Rowing to Nowhere,

When is Enough Enough, an article I wrote. And I ask people to do what I call a relational reckoning. And it consists of this question. Am I getting enough in this relationship to make grieving what I'm not getting worth my while? Am I getting enough to make the pain of my partner's imperfections worthwhile to me? OK. And if the answer is no, I'm not, then go and fight and get some help and maybe leave.

But if the answer is yes, my partner has a real pain in the neck in this and this and this way. But gosh, they're in love in these ways. Then don't be a resentful victim. Embrace what you get and enjoy it. Something you often hear people say about relationships is relationships take work. But I'm not really sure what that means. I believe that the real work of relationships isn't even day to day.

It's minute to minute. In this minute right now, in the heat of the moment, am I going to look at this person as someone I care about? Or am I going to look at this person as the enemy? Am I going to do my same old knee-jerk response, angry for example or am i going to reach for something different uh and that's our choice in this moment and our fate is made up in these momentary decisions over and over and over again. Here's a really unfair question to ask you, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because I really would like to get your opinion on this. What is it, when you look at all the relationships that you see, what is it, if you had to pick one thing, what is it that goes wrong? Most of us, our relationship to relationships is passive in this culture.

You get what you get, and then you complain about it. Most of us try and get more of what we want from our partners by complaining about what they do wrong. That's got to be the most stupid behavioral modification program I've ever heard of. I want people to be more proactive up front and less resentful on the back end. So for example, if I want my wife to listen to me sympathetically because I've had a fight with somebody, she has this great way of turning it into a teachable moment and siding with the idiot I'm fighting with. Well, you know, they really have a point about you, Derek. No, no, no, no, no. And then I'd flip out.

Nowadays, on a good day anyway, I would say, hey, listen, Belinda, I just had a fight. I want about 10 minutes of venting. I don't want you to side with my guy I'm fighting with. I don't want you to teach me anything or solve my problem. I just want you to be on my side, say something like, hey, baby, that sucks. I'm sorry. Can you give me 10 minutes of that? And she will. If I help her by instructing her, if I just leave it to her, we're doomed to failure. And then I get mad, and then she gets mad. We can help our partners deliver for us by empowering them to give us what we want.

Yes, let's speak up for what we want, but let's do it in a way that's skilled and that actually might deliver what we want. Yeah, well, see, that's interesting because most people I don't think would think to say that. Here's what I want you to give me for 10 minutes. It's more of, if you don't, I'll get mad, but you need to figure out what it is I want. Right. That's exactly right. You know, we don't treat our kids that way. We make our expectations clear.

We don't treat our pets that way. We don't train a pet by punishing him every time they don't get it right. We help them out. We teach them what we want, and then we reward them when they get it right. I would like us to treat our spouses as well as we treat our pets. Well, but it begs that question. Why don't we? Why is that not just a natural way of doing it? Because we live in an anti-relational, immature, narcissistic, individualistic, patriarchal culture that gives lip service to relationships but doesn't really value them. We do not teach our sons and daughters the skills they need, the basic skills of relationship. And yet, we've never wanted more out of our relationships.

We want to be lifelong lovers, but we simply don't have the basic skills to pull it off. We need to know what the hell we're doing. There are skills to learn, and they're not even that hard. You just have to know what you're doing, and you have to keep your wits about you in those heated moments. One thing I want to get you to talk about is that when you're having a disagreement and you feel strongly about your point of view, how do you stand up for yourself and not, you know, not be a jerk about it, but still make your case? I'm sorry, but I got to tell you a story. So I was at my friend's. Standing up for yourself with love first came to me with a friend,

Alan Slobodnik. I was on his porch a summer's day with the families, and I was mad about something, and I let him have it. And he looked at me. This is absolutely a true story. And he was vibrating with feeling. I mean, it was intense between us I had just really core dumped on a guy and he said look Terry

The first and most important thing I want you to understand is that I love you You're one of my best friends. You're gonna be one of my best friends that the day we die Nothing I'm about to say has anything to do with that. Now having said that, you come into my porch in the middle of my family in the middle of my dinner that I've invited you into and you dump a kind of righteous anger in me that you know I grew up with, I spent my whole life protecting my family from. I don't like it. Now let me be be clear i don't want to control you and i can't you do what you do but every time you dump that kind of nasty energy on me i'm going to

tell you just how much i don't like it and i don't and i looked at him and michael he had me with I love you. If he had just led with his rebuttal, I'm a fighter. I would know just what to do with that. But when he started off by cherishing our relationship and then said his feelings, I could hear it. And I looked at him and to my own surprise, this is a true story, I said, you're right, you don't deserve it, I'm sorry. And then we had dinner together.

That's the first instance that I was woken up to this idea of standing up for yourself with love. Well, I think anybody who's in a relationship or has been in a relationship or is thinking about being in a relationship ought to download this episode, if they haven't already, and save it and pull it out and listen to it from time to time, especially maybe when things get tough. I've been speaking with Terrence Real. He is an internationally recognized therapist, speaker, and author. The name of his book is Us, Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. I'll also put in the show notes his website,

a link to his website as well. Thanks, Terry. This has been a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks, Mike. It has. It's been a great pleasure talking to you. Take back your free time with PC Express Online grocery delivery and pickup. Score in-store promos, PC Optimum points, and more free time. And still get groceries. Shop now at pcexpress.ca. For those who embrace the impossible, the Defender 110 is up for the adventure. This iconic, award-winning vehicle has been redefined with a distinctive modern design. A reimagined exterior features compelling proportions and precise detailing. Built with integrity and purpose,

the interior boasts robust, durable materials. Whether it's the all-terrain capability, ample cargo capacity, or innovative camera technology, the Defender 110 lets you go further and do more. And with seating for up to seven, everyone can enjoy the journey. Learn more at LandRover.ca. You and I are surrounded by fragrances. There are fragrances in everyday products like soaps and shampoos and laundry detergent, as well as in very expensive perfumes. We seem to like things that smell good, and a lot of those good smells come from nature. So what is it about fragrances that we like so much? And how did putting those fragrances into bottles

and then spraying it on ourselves become such a big industry? It's actually a pretty interesting story, and the person to tell it is Elise Perlstein. She is a natural perfumer, consultant, and educator who conducts classes for corporate and private events and instructs students on the biology, artistry, and history of perfume ingredients. She's author of a book called Scent, A Natural History of Fragrance. Hi, Elise. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me here. I'm glad to talk about fragrance. Well, here's something interesting that I hadn't thought about until I saw your book, and that is we all walk by plants and flowers all the time that smell good, and we enjoy that smell. But clearly the plant didn't do it for our benefit. That's absolutely true. And over the years of teaching about fragrance and teaching perfume classes, one of the iconic fragrances is jasmine. It's gorgeous. It's complex.

We love it. It's almost in every perfume, you know, some version. And yet the jasmine plant does not make that fragrance for us. Its flowers put out probably several hundred molecules that are each a little bit different in fragrance. But the purpose and the goal is to attract moths, those little flying, not butterflies, but the nocturnal version with big antenna that are very sensitive to fragrance. And the reason it's moths is because jasmines are white flowers and they bloom at night. Their fragrance is best at night. What it does for the moths is create what they call a scent plume. If the moth is flying through the garden, it will key in on

that fragrance back to the flower, where then it will pollinate that jasmine flower. So at some point, someone must have said, you know, that flower smells so nice, we should do something with that smell. We should, you know, put it in a bottle and have perfume. But are flowers also bred for fragrance, or we just find the fragrance in the flowers in nature and try to duplicate that, or what? I don't know why we haven't done more with it. There is actually very little breeding for fragrance. And the story of roses kind of points that out. Roses now that you find in the store don't smell. Everybody puts their nose down, but there really is not a fragrance that compares in any way to the wild roses, which are out there attracting pollinators.

And there's a theory that somewhere in the last couple hundred years, people have moved from paying attention to all of our senses, where smell is as important as hearing is as important as vision, but we moved into being very primarily focused on our vision, our sight. So we appreciate the way the petals of the rose curl so nicely, where we appreciate bright colors in our garden. And so we've bred fragrance out, not on purpose, but we've put a primary emphasis on color and form in those

visual things. There are some exceptions to that. You know, lavender is a very, very important aromatherapy and perfume plant. I'm sure there's breeding for that. So at what point did people start taking the fragrance of flowers and put them in a bottle and call it perfume? And how did they do that? Up until really the industrial revolution and the invention of distillation, which was before that, but there were a lot of pieces that had to come together to be able to make perfumes. It takes a lot of roses to make a rose extract, you know, on the order of two or three million roses to make about a pound. And so for centuries, perfume was relegated to the wealthy and the people who could afford that luxury. But as chemists became involved in fragrance, somewhere in the late 1800s, they began analyzing the molecules in the plants

with the idea of, well, if we can make this molecule in a lab and we can take some of the things that jasmine uses to make that gorgeous fragrance. Maybe we can recreate a more affordable version of a jasmine. And so it really took moving away as much, but not totally, from using actual flowers to finding out the molecules that were in the flowers and using those to recreate a white flower fragrance or a rose. So in today's fragrance world, are a lot of perfumes not made from flowers but manufactured in a lab? Yes. For example, violets were always extremely expensive to extract from the flowers. There's very little. But you can take iris roots, which have a very similar fragrance, and you can grow irises a lot easier. But then chemists took those iris roots and analyzed them and came out with a chemical called ionone that

has that violet fragrance. Very much less expensive. And if you remember, I talked about jasmine having, you know, several hundred different ingredients. And jasmine and all of our scented plants have a terroir. Like wine, they will change with the year, or they will change with the soil. And that's great. That's wonderful. But if you're producing perfumes on a massive scale, you want to be able to replicate the same perfume year after year. And so the industry has moved to use single molecules in particular blends to

replicate flowers so that you've got replicability, you know what you're going to get, and you've got affordability. And this is where you also made the change into perfume as kind of a fashion statement, more part of a way of life. So today are there perfumes that are still made from real flowers or is that just gone? It's not gone. It is your higher-end perfumes, especially those made in France in the little town of Grasse, which is on the south of France. That's the kind of the home of the perfume industry. Some of the big houses grow their own jasmine, and they put some jasmine in. And I'm not a commercial perfumer, but I am fairly sure they

also use some of those single aroma chemicals to beef up the jasmine. So a lot of the higher-end perfumes will have some floral notes from flowers in them, but a lot of them do depend on these either synthesized or isolated chemicals to make up the bulk of the formula. So throughout history though, has fragrance been used to kind of pretty up the fact that a lot of the world smells bad? Yes until basically the late 1700s or early 1800s smells were very personal and the perception of smell was maybe a little bit different. Good smells, pleasant smells, were a force for good. They meant good things. They meant health.

They meant lack of disease. Whereas bad smells denoted disease, bad things, evil, and so on. The Black Death and the plague is a case in point. People turned, especially the poorer people, they turned to rosemary and oranges and lavender because they smelled good. They had uplifting fragrances that they felt would help counteract that evil, invisible thing that was making everybody sick. So many of the products, whether it's soap or perfume or anything, seems to be floral-based.

A lot of the scents are either they smell like flowers or they're trying to smell like flowers. But there's a lot of really great smells that don't smell like flowers, like, you know, cinnamon rolls. But I don't know that anybody's captured that in a fragrance. Well, there's a whole area of perfumery called gourmand perfumes. And not so much cinnamon, but vanilla is very popular. Some of the sweeter candy sort of scents.

There's also, and this is going back to the laundry soap aisle, kind of the smell of clean. A hundred years of research have led to these particular, you know, kind of a white musk or clean scent that those of us, at least in the Western world, identify with cleanliness. If you spend a lot of time maybe in a spa, the scent of lavender, you know, and some of those are very clean or refreshing. Let me say refreshing and uplifting. There seems to be, I don't know if you would call it like a backlash against everything having some aroma,

some fragrance to it. I'm part of that backlash, I guess, because I have a sensitivity. I don't know if it's an allergy or what, but there are a lot of fragrances, a lot of perfumes that, you know, make my nose stuffy. I don't enjoy the smell. And I know a lot of other people have that sensitivity to being overwhelmed by so many fragrances. I totally agree with you. And my house is as absent from smell as I can make it. We make soap. I make perfume. But I put all the ingredients in little plastic boxes and put them away.

And there are a lot of people, and it's probably more sensitivity than allergy. And these little chemicals, if you think about it, they are made to go out into the air, some of them to persist so that they carry their message to the moth or the butterfly. And we are breathing those in. You know, if the air is moving and you're outside, it's really fun. It's nice. But if it's in your nose all the time, some people like that. For me, I'm totally with you. Too much is too much.

And more and more people are becoming sensitive. The other thing, too, is that people get used to fragrances. Like when you walk into a room that has a very particular smell, you quickly get used to it and you don't smell it anymore. Right. Basically, you're wearing out the neurons that are passing that message to your brain. And so you don't smell it anymore. You know, if you leave your house for a couple of days and come back in, you say, oh, this is what my house smells like. And hopefully it's like, oh, it feels like home. Right, right. But if you're, once you're in it for 10 minutes, you completely don't smell it anymore. Right. So when the idea of wearing perfume, of taking this liquid and

putting it on your body so that you now smell like that smell, why? Why do that? What's the theoretical basis for this is a good idea? It probably goes way back to where you were covering up the fact that you hadn't had a bath for a month or two. It goes way back to where you were covering up the fact that you hadn't had a bath for a month or two. It goes way back to the idea of luxury and rich people could afford musk and spices and things. But somewhere between the late 1800s and the World Wars, perfume became a statement of fashion, somewhat of luxury, and it's packaged up. You know, people put it in a pretty Lalique bottle, or you put it in a gorgeous package, and it becomes an indulgence. And then in the past 40 years, 20 years, you know, you see TV ads all the time with this star or that star pushing their particular scent. And you look at that and you

say, well, if I wear that perfume, am I going to be as alluring? So there's a lot of messaging, and I would say a lot of the budget for perfumery comes down to messaging and packaging to support that one ounce of mostly alcohol. So I don't know much of anything about perfumes that people wear. I don't wear them because of what we talked about. I'm very sensitive to that. But the only perfume I could even pull out of my mind that I remember is Chanel No. 5. It seems to have become iconic. Everybody knows it. People still wear it. You can maybe identify the smell. What's so special about Coco Chanel's number five? For perfume aficionados, it was very groundbreaking. She wanted a perfume that didn't make people smell like their mother, roses and violets. She wanted something very different. And the perfumer she hired really broke ground on adding unique ingredients.

They call them aldehydes, which is kind of perfume talk, but it added an entirely different feel. But then she was one of the early perfumers that tied that perfume to fashion, the famous little black dress, the elegance, the packaging. Her packaging was very spare and very elegant. Instead of big flowery bottles and pictures, it's a simple black box with her name, and the bottle was square so hers was a a big departure and a step ahead i think in the perfume business and the concept of perfumes if that makes sense but it has it has really stuck around i mean i imagine a lot of perfumes come and go, but that seems to, I mean, that's been around since when? The early 20th century, right? Yeah.

You are absolutely right. She started a movement. She knew what she wanted to do, and people still appreciate that. And it was beautifully composed. But a lot of people use that perfume and isn't part of the thing about perfume is you don't want to smell like everybody else. But if everybody's wearing it, then we're all smelling like Coco Chanel. I really, I don't have any numbers on that. And I think a lot of people do. But from, you know, people I know, they have their signature perfume, and it may be Chanel No. 5.

But there's this thing where our skin makes a difference. Different perfumes smell different on different people. Some people can wear florals, and they smell great, and on some people, they turn kind of sour. And so when you do wear, especially a very good perfume, it blends with your skin and it becomes a little bit more you. We've talked a lot about perfumes, but there are a lot of fragrances that I like that I'm sure other people like that aren't in perfumes. And I know maybe they've tried. For example, one of my favorite fragrances is that smell of freshly cut grass and also the smell of the beach. And I know they say they've tried to, you know, bottle that, but it doesn't smell what I think of as freshly cut grass or the beach.

What is it? What is it about freshly cut grass that makes it so pleasing? Small molecules, little volatile that send the message out that the grass is basically being eaten and danger, danger, and it actually communicates to other. So it's a protective smell. And pine trees have a similar smell. And if you've ever been to the Great Smoky Mountains, the smoke in the Smoky Mountains is actually from all the aromatic molecules that those pine trees and the other trees are putting out.

Well, I find those fragrances, those scents in nature to be very relaxing and therapeutic, and I'm sure other people do too. So it's interesting to hear about the purpose and the history and the benefits of all these fragrances. Elise Perlstein has been my guest, and the name of her book is Scent, A Natural History of Fragrance, and you will find a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Elise. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. I appreciate being able to tell some fragrant stories. How many times have you walked up to your car that's been parked in the hot sun, opened the door to get in, and it's just too hot? You can't get in it.

So what's the fast way to cool a hot car down? Well, here's what the experts say. First, you roll down the passenger side window. Then go to the driver's side and open the car door using the door handle. With the passenger side window down, you're ready to create a low-pressure area that sucks the hot air out and lets the cool air in. Then what you do is you open the driver's side door and fan the door. In other words, rapidly push the door towards the car, stopping just short of actually closing it, open it up

again, and repeat that six to eight times. Then get in your car, turn on the air conditioner, and roll the windows down a bit. Because you know when you first turn on the air conditioner, it blows hot air. So you roll the windows down, that lets the hot air out, and within a few minutes your car is nice and cool. And that is something you should know. So let me be really frank about something. Podcast listening has a tendency to dip in the summer, and we can't have that. We don't want our audience to dip. So that means we need to get some new listeners. And the very best way for us to get listeners is to ask you to share this podcast with someone you know. And every platform in the world, I think, has a share button. Spotify, Apple, they all do.

So it's easy to do, and it would really help us. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community.

Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth

torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.